There is a Pestilence Upon this Land

After more than two months I finally pulled my drawing pen out of its deep state of torpor and stripped again, choosing as the subject the reason it's taken me so long to get back on the crime-fighting horse. Maybe it was the truncated winter break, the cold weather, the grim reality that I only have a few more months of easy-going student life before I work until I die, but for whatever reason I've had trouble motivating myself to do anything but play Dragon Warrior for the past two weeks or so. And Dragon Warrior is a terrible game.

My final group of courses is also proving to be less than inspiring. I somehow managed to enroll in two courses taught by Economics Ph.D.s. I really hate Economics. Another one of my classes resembles the kind of crap that would force a freshman Poli Sci major to question the legitimacy of his chosen field. I considered keeping myself interested by writing an independent paper on labor law and strip clubs, but initial research revealed that the subject has already been thoroughly written on by people more important than me. So, there's very little to keep me going.

Tomorrow (or Tuesday, perhaps) I should be able to decide whether I'm going to try at all this semester. For tomorrow is Grades Day, and if my grades from last semester weren't both super and duper there's really nothing stopping me from drinking five days a week until June. Here's hoping.

6 Comments

I take umberage at your characterization of Dragon Warrior as simply "a bad game". To pass judgement on it without placing it in historical context is to do a grave diservice to RPGs everywhere. Where was FF when Dragon Warrior was born? Where was chrono-trigger? Where was DWII and III and IV? They were floating in the pre-abyss waiting to be born. That's where they were. Think about that before you discount Dragon Warrior as mearly a poorly paced game with limited graphics and an uncreative spell system. It was the first step in the journey of a thousand first steps. Indeed.

In a purely objective sense, a game where you only actually do like five things but it still takes 20 hours to beat because the level advancement is so slow is a terrible game. But I recognize that Dragon Warrior, like Garfield, is something that's objectively terrible but historically significant.